Admiring The Beautiful Texture On The Final Curtain

It's been a while since I've been around here. Sorry about that, if you are easily offended by an absence of words. If you are, may I suggest you avoid this Chopin nocturne which is both nice and hilariously histrionic towards the end, and contains no words at all?

Anyway, I've been busy recently both with the very occasional article for rather lovely TV blog Watch With Mothers (and, of course, spending most of my working days lurking around its comments section with devillish intent and Jeremy Paxman's face) and also with my aim for this year to do one exciting thing a week. So far, and I tediously list this purely for my own personal records, I've seen: Stefan Golanszewski, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring (solo), Collings and Herrin (duo), Tim Key in Slutcracker, Tim Key and others in Party, the films Exam and The Hurt Locker, done the big scary box in the Turbine Hall (well, not really. I was, and I say this as a fully-fledged grown-up who is actually running out of time to reproduce, too scared to go in the big scary box. Even holding someone's hand, like a five-year-old), done the National Portrait gallery (bottom floor, celebrities, only - to my untutored eyes, Hello! on canvas and a head made of blood) and been to see a gig in a vintage furniture shop in Hoxton with about 12 other people, one of whom I randomly follow on Twitter, although we didn't know we knew each other until after the event (Hello Breeks!)

I have also found time to hoover up five series..es...eses of the peerless Battlestar Galactica. Which was great, until it ended. For those of a nervous disposition, look away now, I'm about to shout in bold: HERE BE SPOILERS. HERE BE SPOILERS. I AM ABOUT TO TALK IN DETAIL ABOUT THE END OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. SPOILERS! SPOILERS! DO I MAKE MYSELF PERFECTLY CLEAR?!

Good.

Let's get this straight: I absolutely loved Battlestar Galactica. I loved the plotting, I loved the politics, I loved the characterisation, I loved the way no-one was perfect and your allegiances swayed from episode to episode to support the religious nuts, the other religious nuts, the military guys, the civilian guys, the robots and the other robots. I loved the way someone obviously decided on a whim to cut the corners off paper in the pilot to make it look futuristic and stuck with it doggedly for five years, despite the fact that there's no way such a laborious paper production process would ever evolve in a functioning society. I loved the Final Five stuff, I loved the "Kara Thrace: Saviour of the Universe" stuff, I particularly loved that Hoirish lawyer guy with the dark glasses and the imaginary cat and all his stuff. But then, after five seasons of being sensually massaged to a simmering boil, the final episode was like a jackboot to the teeth.

I guess all you really want from a long-running and impressive show like BSG is that they will have the slightest clue where they're going with it, so even if they are suddenly given the TV equivalent of a P45, a rapidly signed leaving card and a gentle shove out of the front door, they will be able to write a satisfactory ending to their saga. And the kernel of the good idea, presumably there from the start - that after their search for "Earth" came to naught, the fleet would find Earth, and eventually become us, so we are all Cylons - was quite a nice one. But herein lies the first problem, which I shall label the "We Get It" problem.

Here's how the episode went: fight fight fight, cylon cylon cylon, fight fight fight. Oooh, look, swimming out of the inky blackness of space: it's Earth! Oh, we get it. They're us! Cool! Wait, there's half-an-hour left.

OK, now they're on Earth. Look, neanderthals. Yeah, OK, it's a long time ago, all this has happened before and it will all happen again. Very nice. We get it.

Right, they're going to spread out across the continents and settle, and thrive, and we're going to be their descendants. WE GET IT.

Whh...? Modern-day New York? Cos Mitochondrial Eve was in fact Hera, and look, THAT was THEN, and THIS is NOW? Yes! WE GET IT!

Gaius and Caprica Six visions appearing and patiently explaining all of the above to us?!?! Jimi Hendrix on the radio?!?!?! The Honda Asmio robot on a TV?!?!?!?!! WE! GET! IT!

It's just a shame that something that was subtle and nuanced and somehow made broad, grand, sweeping statements about America and its attitudes to race, in a completely alien world, without saying anything at all, felt the need to take a plot point like that and smash it repeatedly round our faces like a fetid flatfish. But maybe they went so overboard on that because of the other weaknesses in the finale, which I shall label the "Really? Really?" problem.

1. Crikey, we've found Earth! Er, somehow. Really? Really?

2. That was all to do with Kara Thrace, who came back from the dead, with a brand-new Viper, saw visions of her dead father, and from a song she had learned as a kid on a piano (long line of keys) typed in the co-ordinates onto a standard keypad (narrow block of rows of keys). Really? Really?

3. Having lead the fleet to Earth, and not having explained what she was or where she'd been, she vanished into thin air. Really? Really?

4. As the fleet observed the neanderthals they would eventually be responsible for shouldering out of the evolutionary history of the Earth - you know, just like at the end of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - they decided to disperse around the planet and start afresh, Galen, for example, going to Lapland where he hung around growing his beard for a few millennia and became Santa Claus - and foreswear all technology. What, really? This random collection of military and civilians who were used to a transient mode of living that was entirely artificial and man-made and reliant on technology beyond OUR wildest dreams could survive more than one winter? Really? Really?

Ah, well. It's merely a teeny crack in what was otherwise a marvellous road of entertainment. (A teeny crack that caused a car to spin straight into the central reservation killing all the occupants, but never mind) I will still have all the good times; and the moment when Saul sank into the wall and muttered "Said the joker to the thief..." is still hovering near the top of my "Ow, my chin!" jaw-drop moments chart.

Talking of endings...

This has broken my heart into a thousand pieces. The arguments from every angle have already been made, so I won't bother myself, if only to say: there is no commercial alternative. It's not the same as Last FM or any other music recommendation engine because in an hour it'll cover at least 50 genres I know nothing about and I'll enjoy it all. It won't be the same if the presenters go elsewhere because they'll still be slaves to playlists. And my washing-up will never be appealing again.

Save 6 Music!

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays: Great. But: Awkward!

Culture alert! It's only 7th January and already I have seen a play. This makes this, with extrapolation, the most highbrow year I've ever had, although my presence at a karaoke evening next week means that statistic is already tottering on the omnipresent ice.

The play that I saw last night was in fact a) two plays and b) not so much two plays as two one-man dramatic monologues. Hey! They have names, you know! The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski Is A Widower; written and performed by Stefan Golaszewski, both a talented bloke and a boon to every theatre critic with a word quota to fill and few ideas to fill it. Stefan Golaszewski is someone I know through being one quarter of the Cowards - seek out their stuff on BBC4 if it is repeated again, although I know not if they still operate as a foursome due to their successful solo careers, which is a great shame for Coward-lovers who I will herefore refer to as Cowardly Custards because I am a linguistic genius - and also because Stefan Golaszewski is a college friend of a friend of mine, of which more later.

So, The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. (I'm sorry. I just love the challenge of typing his name. Try it! Stefan Golaszewski. It feels like your fingers are doing some kind of triple Salko) I can't give a particularly incisive review, seeing as the last time I saw a play I caught a lollipop thrown from stage by a cow, but I thought it was pretty damn good. The first play is the first-person description of an 18-year-old Stefan Golaszewski...OK, OK, SG...hopelessly falling for a gorgeous woman that wanders into his line of vision in a pub, eats his pork scratchings, inspires majestic poetry of the soul and then shits on his heart, as gorgeous women are wont to do. Having made every woman in the audience (ahem) fall madly in love with him, he returns after the interval as the 76-year-old SG - recently widowed, looking back on his life, in turns rueful, giddy with happy memories, and snarling with bitterness, with few flashes of the innocent, sensitive kid of the first play. And every woman in the audience (AHEM!) falls madly straight back out again. Some beautiful visual touches, too, in a mostly wordy experience. A suitcase full of yeses in various languages showered over the audience in response to the gorgeous woman asking for a kiss; an unending parade of parcels bought for a cold and distant wife, thrown to the ground in exasperation. The second play didn't get the critical acclaim of the first when they were performed separately, but I slightly preferred the second one, which probably shows how much I know.

So far so great. What about awkward? Well, this is a bit that both intensified and awkwarded-up the Stefan Golaszewski experience. As I mentioned, SG is acquainted with my theatre-going pal, let's call him The Bo, and due to the scrummy intimateness of the venue - The Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush, less a theatre and more a box with some benches on three sides - plus the popularity of the play and the lateness of our feet, we were left to sit right at the front, in full Stefan Golaszewski view. As he clocked The Bo, who he had not seen for a good long while, there may have been the teensiest of pauses, but an object of professionalism, SG ploughed on regardless. (Although what would he do? Fall to his knees sobbing? Angrily demand we get out? Thought not.) But as the plays went on, there were quite a few moments when he directed stuff straight at us. Both of us. Which included me. (Hang on, let me just put that narcissism alarm that's blaring on mute - it's gonna be going for a while...) He's quite the intense performer, is Stefan Golaszewski, and fantastic with it. But it did mean that as I stared, mesmerised, at him in full ranting flow, and he suddenly looked directly at me and screamed the killer line right in my face, it was...awkward. I didn't know what to do. I tried to hold his glare but I couldn't, so I dropped my eyes to the floor and twisted my paper yeses round and round until they were razor-sharp spears.

Then I poked his eyes out.

Obviously not. And obviously he wasn't looking at me, rather through me, and obviously it was just a coincidence of eyeline, but I do thoroughly recommend the front-row challenge, if you ever see The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. It meant it definitely made more of an impact on me than if I was tucked away in a corner. And obviously I am now composing a one-woman play about a freakish loon who goes to see a one-man play and sits at the front and reads far too much into the experience and ends up destroying the man's life, who then recovers his life by writing a one-man play about a woman who went to see his one-man play and *explosion of meta*

CONCLUSION: Play very good. Stefan Golaszewski fun to type. I still bit fruit-looped. End.


Update: just realised here, two days later, the massive inconsistency of my Stefan Golaszewskis. Goleszewski, Golaszewski. Let's call the whole thing off. Anyway, all misspellings now spelt correctly. I should probably fire myself.